The Joy of Hawaii

I am beginning to feel a deep calling to lead another retreat in Hawaii. For many years every February we went to remember, celebrate and open to life as it is. Many of these retreats were at a magical retreat center on Molokai, and as I write this, my body is alive from the joy of remembering the last retreat at the Hui.

I am writing today because I’m asking you to hold the space that we can gather together again in Hawaii to remember what it is like to live from the ease and the peace that is our true nature. I’m having spine surgery this week and the only thing stopping me from offering a retreat in Hawaii is my health. So please hold that the surgery will go well so that Hawaii can touch us again with its healing presence.

I can feel the essence of the last retreat where we opened our hearts to ourselves and to each other. Such joy! At the end of the retreat, the Hui’s resident artist and manager of the gallery said to me, “I want whatever you all shared together. All of these people came here in their ordinary, everyday selves, and are leaving just glowing.”

What was it that allowed us all to open into the joy and aliveness that is our essence and our birthright?  We first explored the idea that we all have a storyteller in our heads that is based on fear and glued together with judgment. We recognized that we hardly notice most of the fear and judgment that moves through our heads all day long because we have become used to struggling with life.  But the more we looked, the more evident it was that we didn’t have to be run by fear, guilt or shame.

For many of the people, there was a radical shift in perception when they discovered that they didn’t have to believe the stories in their heads!  It was also very freeing to find out that everybody was telling themselves the same story such as: “I can’t trust life, so I have to ‘do it and do it right,’” secretly believing that it was never quite right enough! Then, step by step, we learned how to unhook from these oftentimes subtle stories of fear and self-judgment so that we could simply open to life.

The theme of the retreat was All Is Welcome Here!  When the stories in our heads are met with curiosity and compassion, they let go of their hold on us, and what is left is life in all its magical mystery, right here, right now. As we unhooked from the storyteller in our heads, we also discovered that it is safe to open to life – not an idea of it, but the living experience.  And this is what we are homesick for – the experience of truly being alive!